Picture it. It’s a cool night at the Berkeley Square club on University in lower Berkeley. Any parking not directly on University Avenue is in micro-neighborhoods that no one wants to be caught out in after dark. Of course, there’s never any available parking on University Avenue. After locking my car, I start walking towards the club while reciting my bad neighborhood mantra: Shit, shit, shit. I make it to the door, and sure enough, my name has not shown up on the comp list. It wouldn’t really matter if it did, ‘cause the door guy never consults it anyway.
I pay my four bucks and head inside. I grab a beer and walk out onto the floor near the stage. Even though I’m two hours late, the music hasn’t started yet. As a matter of fact, the roadies are just now getting around to tuning and doing a soundboard check. As I hear the echoes of “check, check” and “two, sibilant, two”, I wonder why they even bother. It’s not like anyone knows how to operate a sound board once the music starts anyway. The sound person is usually quite aware of from whence the oleo on their bread comes, and so cranks the knobs all the way to the right of who ever has the biggest and most abusive ego in the band. Unsurprisingly, this usually leads to all knobs for every PA and mike being pegged on ten, for, as foxholes lack atheists, so do bands generally lack self-validating participants.
As the clock nears midnight, the nine o’clock show is just about to get underway. The club is jammed now, and finally a sign of life other than the roadies starts to be visible in the wings, or, in the case of a club this small, the wing. And out on stage they stumble. As is typical, they look well into their cups, and the quart bottle of well-brand tequila one of them totes by the neck suggests that things are only going to get nastier as the evening, (or by now, morning), progresses. I do notice one unusual thing straight away however – usually it’s Marie who wears the g-string and tube top, but tonight Donny has adopted the look and Marie looks almost mundane in leather hotpants, a tight Menudo t-shirt (post Ricky Martin), Docs, and a necklace made from a ball-gag. The backing band is decked out in matching Dockers, polo shirts, and white straw cowboy hats, providing ironic sartorial counterpoint to the stars.
With Marie screaming “ein zwie drei vier!”, the band launches into a slamming version of “I’m a Little Bit Country”. As brother and sister bellow out the lyrics, the crowd explodes into an instant frenzy. Usually, it takes awhile for the hipper-than-thou college music crowd to warm up to the extent that anything more then golf-claps is given in the way of laudation, but on this night, the chaotic energy is palpable from the very first power chord, and the crowd is sucked in immediately. This isn’t about fun, this is rock and roll. Beer cans fly through the air, people crowd surf and dive off the little plywood stage, and people slam into each other only to carom away non-stop, as if an unspoken mutual agreement had been reached by the crowd to act out the roles of vibrating molecules in a life-sized group impression of an in-use microwave oven.
I look around in wonder as I’m jostled back and forth. I notice that some stars had come out to see the show. As the crowd undulates, I notice Gibby Haines and Sherman Hemsley moshing next to each other. Hemsley looks right at me without seeing, and I notice that not only are his pupils of a size other than normal, they are even a different size from each other. As I muse to myself that this is what George Jefferson would look like if drawn by Ralph Steadman, Hemsley is repeatedly yelling “MOTHERF*CKER!” over and over, with no variance in tone or modulation. As I turn back to the stage, I see Ann Jillian leap off of it in a beautiful swan dive just as Marie spits out a mouthful of tequila. By now, the band’s not even really playing songs, but just conducting a medley of counter-culture pop hits. Segueing from a raunchy cover of Terry Jacks’ “Seasons In The Sun”, Donny explodes into a raging retelling of “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”.
Thirty minutes later, it’s all over. Marie has fallen down, and is dragged like a deadweight sack of cement off the stage. Donny and the backing musicians have kicked the drum set over, and a bit of shrapnel from a destroyed Ibanez Flying-V has left a cut on my cheek as pieces of it flew through the crowd. Slipping on sweat, blood, and vomit, I make my way outside.
Now to make it back to my car alive.
